When you pick up one of Julie Otsuka’s novels for the first time, you will be surprised. That is my promise to you. 

The Buddha in the Attic (2011) was the first novel of hers that I read, back when I was in college. It follows the lives of Japanese picture brides—women who came to America, having been promised as wives to Japanese men already living abroad; their marriages were arranged by a matchmaker, who sent photographs between the potential pair. The novel starts with their trip to America and unfurls into their unpredictable paths as World War II looms. I won’t give away the ending, but there is a devastating shift in narrative that will leave you speechless. 

Her most recent novel, The Swimmers, was published in 2022. It opens up on a community pool, inviting the reader to become acquainted with the regulars. There are competitive swimmers and polite swimmers, lunch break swimmers and swimmers that kick up too much water. There’s a swimmer who steals toilet paper from the bathroom. And then there’s Alice, a woman who is slowly losing her memory to dementia and whose time swimming laps at the pool has become a sacred routine to ward it off. One day, an ominous and aggressive crack appears at the bottom of their beloved pool—and the swimmers are all cast out into the world without this sanctuary. Without this daily ritual, Alice is plunged into the depths of her memories as a child in a Japanese American incarceration camp, while her daughter desperately tries to bring her back from her decline.

Evidently, much of Julie Otsuka’s body of work explores heavy subject matter—the brutal imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the loss of family, the loss of home. Given the current state of America’s history classrooms, the facts alone might be a surprise. But what’s perhaps most shocking is Julie Otsuka’s incredible ability to infuse these bleak moments with levity, and sometimes, even laughter.

A few months ago, I had the joy of speaking with Julie Otsuka about her writing process and the humor that can be found in looking closely.

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Katie Yee

I guess we’ll dive right in! (No pun intended.) Are there any writers or books (or movies or TV shows or podcasts) that you were inspired by before writing any of your novels?

Julie Otsuka

Hemingway was my most important early influence. Especially for my first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine. The cadence of his sentences. His understatement. His quiet humor.

I didn’t read any humorous writers in preparation for writing any of my novels, though.

But if you’re asking about humorous writers that I admire—I’ve always loved the work of Julie Hecht. Her short stories especially, but also her profile of the comedian Andy Kaufman, Was This Man a Genius?  which is, like all of her work, hilarious, weird, and sad.

Who else? Thomas Bernhard. Lydia Davis. Have you read Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special?

KY

I did not. I feel like this is really going to show how little humor writing I’m actually aware of in the world. (laughs nervously)

JO

No, no, no! I have eclectic tastes. The Throwback Special is about a group of male friends who gather every year to reenact this really gruesome football play, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny in a very tender, almost anthropological way. It’s all about everyday human interactions between men. 

In terms of TV shows… How To with John Wilson. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I have watched a few of his episodes, like “How To Put Up Scaffolding” and “How To Be Spontaneous.” They’re these really deadpan explorations of topics that could, at times, seem rather absurd. They’re brilliantly funny. I like people who go at things kind of quietly and observationally. I guess I like understatement in humor.

KY

Without having seen How To, even just thinking about the way that The Swimmers begins, I can see that. The narrator offers a lot of guidelines: how to interact with the swimmers when you come into the pool. It’s funny because it’s very particular. How did you discover that you can put your humor and your voice like that onto the page? 

JO

I don’t think of myself as being a super funny person. I don’t even really aspire to be humorous on the page. I wasn’t aware that The Swimmers was all that funny until people began reading it and commenting on the humor. But for every person who thought that the book was funny, there was another person who found the book “too sad,” “a tough read.” I try to write things straight, as they come to me. A lot of my writing is just describing the world.

But I always appreciate humor in other people. I’m never the life of any party. (laughs) If you met me at a party, you’d probably think, “Oh, she’s a little boring,” and just move on. Get a drink at the table. Next. (laughs) My parents both had good senses of humor, though. My brothers, too. That was just part of our way of interacting as a family. 

KY

A lot of your writing, as you were saying, is a quiet humor. In other interviews, you’ve said that you started with writing comedy before you dove into historical fiction. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your early comedy writing, and what drew you into that mode of storytelling initially, and how that background comes into play in the rest of your work?

JO

When I first began writing, I wrote these short, humorous sketches about the guy that I was dating at the time. As a form of amusement. I’d recently quit painting, which was the one thing I’d always wanted to do, and was very unhappy. But I’d show these sketches to the guy, and he’d burst out laughing. After we broke up, I decided to sign up for some writing workshops—as a form of recreation, really. It was just something to do, now that I wasn’t painting anymore. I don’t think I realized that my writing was particularly funny, but that’s how it was received in class. 

I never wrote anything “serious” until I started writing the first chapter of When the Emperor Was Divine, so that was a real shift for me, because I’d only written the humorous sketches. That’s all that I knew I could do. I didn’t know if I could “do” serious or not. And yet, that’s how I presented to the world, as a writer of serious historical fiction. But up until then, my stories had all been set in contemporary New York City, often about a young woman and her relationships, with her friends or with men. It was pretty autobiographical. 

KY

Dating is usually good fodder for funny material.

JO

All those stories are in a drawer somewhere, and I would never try to get them published, because they seem like the work of a very young person, someone just starting out. 

KY

I don’t know that you ever read like you were just starting out. You have this masterful ability in all of your books—even the ones that cover very serious topics—to bring a lot of daily levity to the scenes. This might seem like a silly exercise, but I guess what I’m trying to do here is figure out how to be funny on the page. Bear with me! I was wondering if you could take us through some of your thought process when you’re writing—lines that you think are funny or scenes that you look back on and think that was humorous.

JO

In The Swimmers, there’s a passage in the chapter called “The Crack.” It’s: 

What we know about the crack so far: it is not the result of a malfunctioning hydrostatic relief valve (Ted Huber, Certified Pool Inspector, ABC Pool & Spa: “Valve’s good”) or illegal after-hours drilling at a nearby construction site (Al Domenico, Project Manager, Integrity Construction: “Wasn’t us”). It’s definitely not a calamity (Pool Spokesperson Isabel Grabow: “This is definitely not a calamity”) or a hoax (Safety Risk Officer Larry Fulmer: “It’s real, people”), though there’s a teeny tiny chance (Office of Structures mathematician Edward Yee: “We’re talking statistically insignificant at best”) that it’s a mistake. 

It was really fun to come up with the lines that those people would say. It’s very intuitive for me. I just know when a line is good. I just know, you know? Those lines are all understatements. They’re all people trying to get out of admitting—fessing up—to having any responsibility at all for the crack, which I found funny. People are downplaying something when they actually know what the truth is. I think I’m good at coming up with scenarios. I knew this could be a fun paragraph to write, all these people saying, “Not us! Not us! Not us!” basically.

KY

There’s something about the parentheses, which are consistent throughout—and in the section you just read with the experts. There’s something just so recognizable about those lines. My father works in construction, so I could hear that. I feel like you were writing directly to me and my reference points in this. But just the very human recognizability of that: “Valve’s good!” “Wasn’t us!” The way that you are able to occupy people’s voices has something to do with your humor. 

I know talking about comedy is hard because the more you explain a joke, the more it’s not funny. This has been an experiment in even just talking about humor, so thank you for indulging me in this!

JO

I think it’s great. I don’t think people talk a lot about humor in Asian American writers. Do they? 

KY

I don’t think people expect us to be funny! 

JO

Why? Why wouldn’t we be?

KY

Right? I was wondering if you could talk about how your humor has shifted from book to book, from project to project. You were saying that you think humor comes across more in The Swimmers. 

JO

I’m most myself in The Swimmers. That voice is probably closest to my “natural” voice. The humor in Emperor is much quieter, and most apparent in the relationship between the girl and the boy, the way they interact. I see that novel as being told in black-and-white. And then you have these flashes of color—lighter, humorous moments. Color being the boy’s amazement at the beauty of the desert, the lizards and tortoises, that childlike wonder of the world he’s somehow able to hang onto, even if he’s living in a concentration camp. I think there’s a lot of humor—or at least sarcasm—in the last chapter, too, although only one person has ever told me they found it funny. The book would be very hard to take if it were unrelentingly grim, which is another reason to have these occasional moments of respite with humor.

The humor in The Buddha in the Attic is more overt than in Emperor. When I was writing the first chapter, “Come, Japanese!” about the picture brides sailing over to America on the boat, I remember laughing out loud. But when I heard it read on stage at Symphony Space, nobody laughed at all. I thought, “Oh no!” But I realized it was because people found it extremely sad. I don’t think I realized how sad it was. So much of writing happens at a very unconscious level. But I do think that humor and sadness are flip sides of the same coin.

With The Swimmers, I just felt like: I’m going to let loose. I’m going to be me. (laughs) It was a much more comfortable voice for me to inhabit. Buddha was very constrained by its formal structure. Each paragraph is like a sonnet or a poem. It’s got this very melodic thing going on. The whole book was all about the rhythm of the language, where the accents fall. Whereas The Swimmers is a little baggier, looser. There was more room in it for me to relax. Be myself.

KY

It definitely reads that way. You were saying you heard Buddha in the Attic read out loud and nobody was laughing. Do you think people are afraid to laugh at certain subject matter?

JO

I don’t think that the audience was trying to be polite. I think they were actually moved by the sadness. If you’re in an audience, live and in real time, you do laugh if something is funny. You can’t help it. Laughter is an involuntary reaction. I don’t think there’s anything that should be off-limits with humor. We often laugh because we feel uncomfortable, right? But in terms of race, people are more careful about laughing. Especially if you’re laughing at someone of a different race and their humor. Nobody wants to offend. Everyone is so careful.

KY

Definitely. There’s good and bad with that! And you were saying that sadness and humor were two sides of the same coin. Can we talk about the emotional landscape of humor? Do you think there are any other emotions that it can encompass? Or, what does comedy create for us on the page that other genres don’t? Could you speak to that a little bit more? 

JO

Humor is good at getting at outrage. But you can be just as outraged when writing something straight, when writing something that isn’t funny at all. What does humor allow? As a writer, humor is a way of drawing the reader in, saying, “It’s okay to come in,” when you’re actually dealing with very serious subject matter. It’s a way of saying, “This isn’t going to hurt. (laughs) I’m harmless. You can come in. Enter the story.” 

What interests me are those awkward moments when you’re not sure if you should be laughing at or with someone, or laughing at all—I love that discomfort, you’re keeping the audience on their toes. Like when Tig Notaro comes out on stage and says, “Hello, I have cancer, how are you,” and people in the audience burst out laughing, but she’s dead serious. So it’s like, “Come on in,” followed by, “I’m going to totally slay you.”

KY

Humor definitely has a disarming effect. It encourages people to let their guard down. I wanted to circle back to what you were saying before. You clearly have a natural instinct for humor in your voice. But I was wondering if you have any kind of sounding board, maybe through the editing process? Obviously, if you’re a stand-up comedian, it’s very different because an audience either laughs in front of you or they don’t. I spoke to Elaine Hsieh Chou about this, and she told me that she learned there’s a job that you could have, where you work in television and they bring in people who are funny professionally to “punch up” a script, to take the jokes and make them even funnier. I’m wondering if there’s anything like that in your editing process. How do you know when something is landing?

JO

No, there isn’t. I don’t have a sounding board. I write, and I’m very much to myself throughout the entire writing process. When I finish a chapter, I’ll send it to my agent. She’s usually the first person to look at it. But hopefully, she’ll just tell me she loves it. And I’ll keep on going. But I won’t get feedback on individual lines or paragraphs. So, no. I’m not even aware of trying to be particularly funny. I’m just writing. In that way, I don’t know—or even care—if something is going to “land.” It’s just not something I even think about. I don’t think: Is this funny? It’s just: Oh, this is right for this sentence and this paragraph. Usually, there’s something I’m trying to convey, the description of people’s fear of doing flip-turns or whatever. I’m not thinking about particular lines, I’m thinking about the bigger picture. I’m not even aware that some of these things are going to seem funny to the reader at all.

KY

Is it off-putting to hear that certain readers find certain things funny? 

JO

No, I love it. It’s great. (laughs) One of my college roommates said to me, after reading The Swimmers, “I didn’t know you were so funny!” This is somebody that lived with me for a couple of years. It’s a nice thing to hear. 

KY

So much of it comes from your very careful and loving observations: the boy on the train observing nature or the people in the locker room. What is your process for garnering these observations? Do you keep a notebook that you write these observations in? Or is it all up there when you sit down?

JO

As you can see on my wall, I have a lot of notes and stuff. I’ll just write things down and tape them to my wall. A fleeting thought, an idea for a scene, the name of a book I want to check out. I do carry a little Muji notebook with me wherever I go. If I overhear a good line, or see something interesting or weird, I’ll write it down. So it’s both. What’s in my head when I start to write is a lot of the stuff that I’ve already written down. I keep research notebooks, too. These are my “big” notebooks. But these are more informational, not notebooks of funny lines. Although I’ll always have a section that says “LINES,” where I’ll write down lines that I’ve read or that I think are funny. I don’t know if I’ll ever use them or not. 

KY

I feel like a lot of writers use Twitter (or X) for that. They throw their one-liners out. 

JO

That’s interesting. I could never do that. I don’t like talking about my work while I’m writing. I call it “being inside the egg.” It’s a protected, womb-like space. If something’s not funny, I just wouldn’t want to know. Once I’m done with a chapter and somebody reads it and they think something is not working, I’m totally open to criticism, but while I’m in the middle of writing, I don’t want any feedback. I don’t want to destroy the illusion that what I’m doing could be good. (laughs) 

KY

That makes sense. Incubation. 

JO

I’m living in the dream still.

KY

My last question that I have for you is hopefully a fun question: what’s something that always makes you laugh?

JO

Hanging out with my best friend—I always laugh when I’m with her. She’s extremely funny. But there’s no one specific thing I can think of that always makes me laugh. Although when I was growing up, I loved Carol Burnett. Do you know who she is?

KY

No…

JO

There’s a generational gap between us. But it was The Carol Burnett Show, and she was just hysterically funny. Jonathan Winters was on that show, too. A genius. It was adult humor, but even as a kid, they cracked me up. 

KY

There’s something here about humor that you make with other people, in the room with your best friend, and the humor that you do quietly on the page. 

JO

When it’s two people, you’re riffing. You’re working off each other. It’s a form of play. 

 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.